


The Mad Therapist

by RoseAngel



Series: The Red Thread [20]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, First Meetings, Gen, John Watson's Blog, POV First Person, Prompt Fic, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 17:08:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11971842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseAngel/pseuds/RoseAngel
Summary: An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break. - Ancient Chinese beliefA series of alternate ways that John and Sherlock could have met. PROMPT FICPrompt #20: Suppose Sherlock pretended to be a therapist to gather information and John became his client instead of Ella's?





	The Mad Therapist

**Author's Note:**

> I apologise for the delay in getting this to you. Adulting is hard. However, I've got the next one ready to go shortly and the one after that is just waiting on some beta-ing, so there shouldn't be such a long delay for at least the next couple.
> 
> As always, a million thanks to the beautiful Becca ( LlamaWithAPen) for her excellent beta-ing.
> 
> Today's prompt comes from FanFiction.Net user Cyrania de Bergerac.

The Blog of Doctor John H. Watson  
2 April 2012

On the 29th of January, I started seeing a therapist by the name of Sherlock Holmes. At his suggestion, I started keeping a blog as a way of documenting our sessions and my recovery. I was doing so in the form of private entries up until this point, because I had no interest in sharing something so personal with the world. Besides, most of these entries were no more than a few lines long, because nothing interesting ever happened to me that I considered worth noting down.

This entry is not a private one, because this is a story I think people might want to hear. It might complement some of the newspaper articles that some of you will have read this week.

To begin, a bit of background. I was an army doctor, serving in Afghanistan. Late last year, I was shot in the shoulder and invalided home. Recovering from any injury is not easy, let alone an injury received in traumatic circumstances. The army knows this. So, when I was sent back to London, I was assigned a therapist. If this had not been enforced, I don't think I would have sought out a therapist myself. I've never been a fan of talking about my problems, especially not to people who I do not know. Looking back now, I can only imagine how different my life would have been had I never gone to therapy – and not for the reason you think.

Let me tell you a bit about my therapist, Sherlock Holmes. I've rewritten this paragraph several times – writing and deleting, writing again and deleting – trying to work out how I can describe him to you. There's something about Sherlock that is almost beyond words. For one thing, he is not at all what you might expect in a therapist. You think therapist, and you think of someone who sits across from you in a quiet room and coaxes answers out of you in a gentle manner, someone who encourages you to speak without pushing the subjects that you refuse to focus on. Sherlock Holmes is nothing like that. He's arrogant and rude, and probably a little bit mad. He did not have the patience that you would expect in a therapist. He wasn't willing to wait for you to speak when you're ready. As a matter of fact, he didn't need to; he did not need to wait for you to speak before he knew exactly why you were there.

See, Sherlock Holmes can read you like an open book. Maybe he's secretly psychic – I wouldn't put it past him. He knew things about me during our first therapy session even before I had spoken. I wasn't surprised when he brought up Afghanistan or my career as an army doctor – I figured he would have been given that information when our first session was organised. Yet he knew more than this. He looked at me and was able to tell things about my family background, things that happened long before Afghanistan, things that wouldn't have been written in any files. It was like everything about me was written into my skin, in the tan lines on my wrists or the creases on my forehead. He could also tell whenever I was lying, or holding things back. I don't claim to be a particularly good liar at the best of times, but Sherlock made it seem like he could see the truth behind even the most well-formulated lie.

Sitting in his office felt kind of like being dissected. Whatever secrets I carried with me, he would find ways to draw out. He'd either see them without asking me to speak, or he would find some way to control the conversation until I was forced to open up to him.

The way that I'm describing him makes him sound all bad, but that's not the case at all. There's a reason why I went back after the first therapy session, and why I kept coming back after that. There's something strangely likeable at him, despite his abruptness. He's charming, really. And he has a weird way of making you want to tell him things – perhaps because you know that he'll see it even if you don't say it anyway. He's the weirdest therapist in the world, but he was good at it. Which is strange, because he wasn't really a therapist.

(I'll get to that in a moment.)

To say that Sherlock Holmes' methods were unorthodox would be an understatement, and I'm not just talking about his ability to read your mind. When he was reading my mind – or "deducing" me, as he liked to call it – it was still like a traditional therapy session. We would sit across from each other and talk about heavy issues, like you would expect to do in therapy. However, not all of his therapy sessions were like this. Some of his sessions involved excursions away from his office. These sessions were easily the most bizarre, and also the best.

Take, for example, the first excursion, during the third week of therapy. The week prior, we had started talking about my recovery since I had come home from Afghanistan. (And when I say talk, I mean he had started to make deductions about my recovery.) I won't bore you with details, but what you need to know is that I had a tremor in my left hand – my dominant hand. He noticed it during the session while we were talking about the war, though he didn't say much about it. I had always assumed that it was associated with stress. My doctor had said as much, when he couldn't find a physical cause. It's probably stress, he said. Therapy will help. I didn't know any better.

Sherlock Holmes, however, knew better. I don't know how he knew, but he did. My tremor wasn't caused by stress and he proved it. When I arrived at the clinic for our third session, Sherlock was locking up. There was a cab waiting for us in the street, and Sherlock explained that we were having the session out of the clinic. Where were we going instead? A shooting range. Sherlock took me to a shooting range, put a gun in my hands, and gave me a target to fire at.

And it helped. I can't explain how, but it helped. The first few shots were shaky, but then Sherlock was talking to me, making me talk about the war, making me put myself back there in my head, and suddenly I was firing at the target and my hand was perfectly steady. I was almost right on target. Sherlock proved that anxiety or stress or PTSD was not the cause of my intermittent tremor. I didn't fear the war. I missed it. I know that mustn't make sense to anyone who hasn't been to war – and perhaps even to people who have – but for me, being an army doctor in Afghanistan gave me a sense of purpose I'd never had anywhere else. I was saving lives. I was making a difference. It wasn't the fear of the war that caused my tremor, but the fact that I was trying to acclimatise to London again, and that sense of purpose I had had in the war was gone.

That example isn't even the most remarkable thing that he did. He did far more than just diagnose the cause of my problems. When I first started going to therapy, I had a limp. My leg ached, and I had to walk with a cane. I'd never received any severe leg injury that should have caused that sort of limp, but I was sure that it had a physical cause. In one of our first therapy sessions, Sherlock had told me, among a list of deductions, that my limp was psychosomatic, but I didn't believe him. How could something that caused so much pain, something that was so debilitating in my life, be all in my head?

Sherlock, being Sherlock, found a way to prove that my limp was psychosomatic. We had another excursion therapy session, where he took me out for a walk. Of course, this didn't seem to do much at first except highlight how much I was struggling – he's got long legs and takes big steps, and I was struggling to keep up. Eventually, we stopped at a cafe for lunch. We didn't discuss my limp or anything – we got far off topic. He was getting me to focus on other things. I didn't realise at the time that he was distracting me, but I can see that now. Then, suddenly, he cut himself off mid-sentence, staring as though he had seen something outside the window, and he jumped up and ran. I didn't know what was going on, but I'd known that the look on his face had been one of panic, and I had jumped up and followed him. Chasing after him was the only thing that made sense. I didn't realise that I'd left my cane behind. With the adrenaline, with my focus on keeping up with Sherlock, my brain just seemed to forget that I had been limping for months. It sounds ridiculous, I know, that I could have forgotten about something so debilitating, but it worked. I ran, without limping, and I don't think I even realised I wasn't limping until I caught up with Sherlock and he pointed it out. He hadn't seen anything out the window; he had just wanted to get me running, and it had worked. I haven't needed my cane since.

The point I'm trying to make is that Sherlock is the most bizarre therapist that I could have possibly been assigned to, and at the same time, he was the best therapist in the world. Maybe his methods wouldn't work for everyone – in fact, given his somewhat abrasive personality, I'm certain his methods wouldn't work for everyone – but it worked for me. The more time I spent with him, the more I found myself trusting him, and the more willing I was to open up and talk to him. I've never found it easy to talk about any heavy issues. The fact that I could do so with Sherlock is a big deal.

Then one day, I reached his office and found that he wasn't there.

I hadn't received any calls or emails to tell me that our appointment had been cancelled or rescheduled. I waited outside his office for a good half hour in case he was running late, but he didn't turn up. It wasn't like him to be late. I assumed that he was sick, and perhaps he just hadn't been feeling well enough to remember to call me and cancel the appointment. Things like this happen sometimes. I decided I'd go home and I'd call the next day to reschedule our appointment.

Unfortunately, the only number of Sherlock's that I had was his office number, so, if he was too sick to come into the office, I had no way of contacting him. When I called his office the next day, I got no answer. I tried both in the morning and in the afternoon and had no luck getting onto him. I admit I was a little worried – it had only been a couple of days without word from him, but it seemed odd that he couldn't find the time to just shoot me a quick email. I wanted to get in touch and make sure he was all right. I went looking for an alternate contact number, and found the number for the clinic that he worked for. I assumed that if I called that number, someone would be able to either give me a contact number or contact him themselves to check in on him.

So, I called the clinic, and was told that they did not have anyone by the name of Sherlock Holmes working for them.

This was the point when I started to worry.

I asked the woman on the phone to check the information again, twice, because I had definitely seen a man by the name of Sherlock Holmes. Yet, there was no Sherlock Holmes in their system. There was no Sherlock Holmes working for them, and there never had been.

Naturally, the next person I decided to contact was the doctor who had originally referred me to this clinic. Surely he would know about the Sherlock Holmes that I had been seeing for the past couple of months. Surely he would be able to give me some answers. When I contacted him, however, I was told that he had not heard of Sherlock Holmes either. In fact, he had thought that I would be attending therapy sessions with a woman named Ella.

You can imagine the amount of stress that this led to. I didn't know what to think. The idea that I had been seeing a therapist who wasn't really a therapist – or, at least, who wasn't supposed to be my therapist – terrified me. I couldn't make sense of it and I didn't know what was going on. It terrified me to think that I had been opening up to someone, starting to trust someone, who I should not have trusted at all. As you can imagine, I did not get very much sleep that night.

It was during that night that I had the bright idea to look Sherlock Holmes up on the internet. Some of you will laugh at that – maybe you would have come up with this clever idea long before I did. I'm sure, for some of you, looking people up on the internet is second nature, because so much of our lives nowadays are spent online. However, I haven't grown up completely surrounded by technology. Aside from this blog, I've never used a great deal of social media. That, and before this discovery, I had no reason to look my therapist up on the internet, either.

Anyway. So I looked up the name Sherlock Holmes, and, unsurprisingly, I could not find any information about a therapist with that name. What I did find was a website, titled The Science of Deduction. The website was written by a man named Sherlock Holmes – not a therapist, but a detective.

I can't think of a scarier job description to have been read. I'm not a criminal, and I have nothing to hide, but that does not mean I was comfortable with the idea that I had been opening up to a detective. It sickened me to discover that the person I was starting to trust had been wearing a mask all along, pretending to be someone I could speak openly with to get information out of me. I'm still not sure if what he did was legal – it probably wasn't – but I couldn't go back in time and take back what I had said to him. I didn't know who to turn to, who to talk to. I couldn't go to the police, because I wasn't sure if he was working with the police, and if going to talk to them would just put me in more trouble. I didn't know who else to talk to.

There were a number of contact details on the man's website – phone number, address, email. The next morning, I decided that I had to contact him somehow, because I had to know for sure who he was and what he had been doing. How could I go back to living my life normally after finding out that my therapist had actually been a detective? There were too many questions. I called the number on the website, and I think a part of me was hoping that it wouldn't really be him, that this detective would not be the same Sherlock Holmes that I had been seeing. It was wishful thinking – too wishful, of course. He didn't pick up, but the message on his answering machine confirmed my fears. He has a very distinct voice. There was no doubting that the phone number belonged to him.

The fact that he had not picked up the phone did not make me give up. If anything, it made me more determined to find him, to get answers out of him. I didn't want to bother with his email address – I didn't see the point in waiting around for what could be weeks before I got a response to an email. I didn't want to read an explanation; I wanted to hear it, preferably in person. Later that morning, when I decided it was a respectable hour, I went to the address on the website. Sitting in the cab on the way there, I knew this could be dangerous. I knew that there was every possibility that this was the wrong thing to do, that this would just get me into more trouble. I didn't care. I needed answers. I was desperate.

Sherlock wasn't there, when I reached his flat. The person who opened the door was a lovely woman – his landlady. And with her was a man by the name of Detective Inspector Lestrade. As it turned out, Sherlock Holmes had not been seen or heard from in over two days – since the day that should have been my therapy session.

The fact that I was an unfamiliar face who was looking for Sherlock Holmes made the Detective Inspector eager to talk to me. I was more than willing to answer honestly – I knew it was my best chance of getting the answers I wanted, and I knew that I, myself, had done nothing wrong. I told them how I had met Sherlock, how I had been seeing him as a therapist for the past month or two. This was news to them. Apparently, Detective Inspector Lestrade knew of the case that Sherlock had been working on, but he had not known that Sherlock was pretending to be a therapist to investigate it. I gather Sherlock has a tendency to go off on his own and do things his own way. It did not surprise me to learn that his ways of investigating a case were as unorthodox as his therapy sessions.

I told Lestrade everything I could – which wasn't very much, but I hoped that the information about the therapy sessions and the clinic would help. Lestrade seemed to find it interesting, at least. He asked me where the clinic was, and then we were heading there. I don't know if he let me come with him because he hoped I could help, or if it was just because I insisted on it. Perhaps it was a combination of both.

So, we went to the clinic, and the receptionist let us into the office as soon as she saw Lestrade's badge. I remember wondering who the receptionist really was – if Sherlock had not been who he claimed to be, was the receptionist also someone else? Or perhaps, like me, she had been fooled by Sherlock's mask, believing that there was nothing unusual about the clinic in which she worked.

Sherlock's office did not look any different from the last time I was in there. It had not been cleared out – his belongings were still on the desk and on the shelves. This made me more worried that something had happened to Sherlock. If he had left of his own accord, I would have thought that he would take his things with him. Yet, all his things were still there – including the little black book that he had been using to take notes during our meetings. It was still in the drawer where I knew he kept it. I found it and gave it to Lestrade.

I had not thought much of the book that Sherlock wrote in before now. During our first meeting I found myself watching his pen scrape over the paper, and I was able to read his writing upside down. He caught me doing so, and after that he took to positioning his hand in such a way as to block my view. I hadn't thought anything of it. With the fact that so many of our sessions after that were spent out of his office, I didn't see him writing in the book all the time anyway. It turned out that he had still been taking notes while we had our excursion sessions, though, so he must have been filling out the book after his sessions were over.

I wasn't Sherlock's only client. The notebook contained pages and pages of scribbles and notes on various other clients. Naturally, my curiosity got the better of me, and I flipped through the pages that he had written on me. I think, if I had seen his notes earlier, I might have had my suspicions before now. His notes weren't the sort of thing you would expect from a therapist. It seemed more like he was profiling me. He had made notes not just on my mental wellbeing or my recovery, like you'd expect a therapist to do, but he had also made notes on things, like how good a shot I was at the shooting range, or how fast I ran.

I wasn't the only one he had been profiling, too. I think he had been profiling everyone. I did not spend too long reading through any pages other than my own – even that felt like too much of an invasion of privacy – but I did accidentally turn to the page that came immediately after mine. Right at the bottom of the page, Sherlock had written the word 'SUSPECT' and circled it.

Lestrade took the notebook as evidence, and gave me his number. He told me to contact him if I heard from Sherlock, or if I thought of anything that might help. Then he dropped me home.

I know I'm no policeman. I know, in the grand scheme of things, I'm not even that important. I was hardly someone who knew Sherlock well, or would have anything to offer that might help Lestrade and his men find out where Sherlock had gone. Yet, I suppose it was only to be expected that I wanted to be involved in this. A part of me was still furious, because I had opened up to Sherlock, not realising that he was manipulating me. At the same time, the fact was still that Sherlock Holmes had helped me. He had cured my limp and given me a safe space to talk about things that were going on in my head, and he might have saved my life. I didn't want anything to have happened to him.

I couldn't focus on anything else when I got home that afternoon. I tried watching telly, but my mind kept wandering to Sherlock, to the list of things that could have happened to him. I couldn't relax or take my mind off him, not when there was a real possibility that he was hurt. I could hardly try to live a normal life with that constantly playing at the back of my mind.

I found myself back on his website – The Science of Deduction – even before I had made the decision to open it. I did not expect to find anything helpful on there, but I found myself looking at the contact details on the page. There was probably no good to come from calling him, but there was no harm in trying. More than likely, I would not get a response, and I would have wasted a moment of my day. But, if there was a small possibility that he would pick up, surely it was worth a try. It seemed slightly more productive than sitting on be sofa and feeling hopeless.

He picked up.

The sounds I heard on the other end of the line were muffled. It was impossible to make out words. I could hear Sherlock's voice, and another voice that I did not recognise – and it did not sound like they were getting on. It sounded as though there was a struggle. It confirmed everyone's worst fear – something really had happened to Sherlock.

Right before the call disconnected, I heard Sherlock say one word.  _Redbeard_. Then the call cut out.

The first thing I did was call Lestrade to explain to him what had just happened. It was impossible to ignore the gravity of the situation now. I gave him all the information I could, including that I had heard the word Redbeard, even though it had meant nothing to me at the time. Was Redbeard the name (or nickname, more likely) of the other person on the phone? Or a company or group with which that person was associated? I searched for it online after Lestrade had hung up, but I could not find anything useful. I could only hope that the resources that Lestrade had would reveal more than a simple web search could.

As it turned out, however, all of Scotland Yard's finest resources weren't even necessary – not at that point, anyway.

I can't say where the idea came from. I don't know if it was something I saw on the telly, or a flash of text on the webpage that was still open on my laptop, but the word Redbeard kept playing around in my head, and I found myself thinking, what if it wasn't a name at all? What if Sherlock had not been trying to give us the name of his abductor, but instead had been trying to say something else entirely. I wondered if it was some sort of secret message, or code. Then I wondered if it was a passcode.

One of Sherlock's quirks as a therapist was that I did not always have his full attention. His phone sat on his desk at all times – occasionally he would pick it up and respond to a message, or check something online. It had bothered me at first, but after that, Sherlock's sessions had started to really make a difference to my life, so I didn't care if he checked his phone from time to time. If he was doing things like curing my limp, he could do just about whatever he wanted. Anyway, because he kept his phone on his desk and fiddled with it so much, I knew he had a smartphone. And his smartphone, like most smartphones nowadays, had GPS.

I found the website for his phone brand, which included a "Find my Phone" link. The username was Sherlock's email address – that was on the website – and the password: redbeard.

It worked. The page loaded, and within three minutes there was a map reference on screen, a blinking dot showing where Sherlock was – or, at least, where his phone was. There was no guarantee that the map would lead to Sherlock. He had had his phone before, when he had answered my call, but he might not have it now. He could have left his phone behind – or been forced to leave his phone behind – and could be long gone by now. However, it was a lead, and at this point, it was the best lead we had.

I called Lestrade at the same time I was rushing out the door. I was unwilling to sit around and do nothing while I waited for him to pick up. I wanted to get to the place where the blinking dot had been on the map. When Lestrade answered, it's a miracle he managed to understand just about anything I said on the phone, I was that frantic. I told him about the password, and the map reference, and he told me he was on his way.

The map reference took us to an abandoned warehouse – boarded up windows, walls that were falling apart. There were two different buildings, and the map reference could not give me any information as specific as which building Sherlock – or his phone – was in, but at least this was a start.

It turns out that Sherlock was in there, not just his phone. He was able to fill in the blanks for me afterwards.

Basically, Sherlock had been investigating a series of murders. He had worked out from examining the crime scenes that the murderer had a military background, and had likely only recently returned to London. That was why he decided to pose as a therapist. There was no guarantee that the murderer would even become one of his clients, but he seemed to believe that he chances were good enough to make it worth a try. And it had worked, in a sense. The murderer had indeed been one of Sherlock's clients. Unfortunately, what Sherlock had not realised was that the murderer also knew who he was. Which meant that in every session, when Sherlock was trying to get information out of him, trying to work out if he really was their guilty suspect, the murderer was one step ahead. Every answer he gave was carefully planned, so he only gave away as much as he wanted – enough for Sherlock to think that he was putting pieces of the puzzle together, without putting himself in any real danger of being caught. The murderer had fooled Sherlock into believing he was solving the case, lulling him into a false sense of security, leading him into a trap.

The day of the appointment that Sherlock had missed – the start of this whole mess – Sherlock had gone to the clinic to meet me for my appointment. The murderer, however, had been waiting for him.

Sherlock could not tell me much about the few days in between the appointment-that-never-happened and the day we found him, because he was so heavily drugged for the duration of it. The amount that Sherlock had said he had been dosed with - I'm surprised he had survived it at all. I guess he must have a high tolerance.

We'll never know what the murderer's motives were. Maybe wanted to hold Sherlock hostage, for money or for his freedom or for something else entirely. Maybe he wanted to kill Sherlock like he had all his other victims, and just wanted to draw it out first, to make Sherlock suffer. When the police and I reached the warehouse, the murderer was ready to kill, ready to fire a bullet into Sherlock's head. He might have only been seconds away from pulling the trigger – then someone else shot him through one of the windows, killing the murderer and saving Sherlock's life in the process. Apparently, that shooter wasn't with the police. He or she must have run off before the police could find them, but I suppose someone like the murderer was bound to have enemies. Whoever they were, they saved Sherlock's life.

Sherlock's okay, miraculously. He was in a pretty bad way when the police reached him – a combination of the drugs and the fact that he would have had limited food and drink for two days. He was taken to hospital, and the doctors and nurses had a tough time keeping him there. Rumour has it he made two attempts at escaping through the open window. He was discharged at the earliest opportunity, and I don't know who would have been happier to get him out of there: Sherlock himself or his nurses.

And now – well, now, I've moved in with him. It just sort of happened. I would not have expected to be living with a madman like Sherlock Holmes two months ago, but I suppose, two months ago, I wouldn't have expected to find out that my therapist was actually a madman detective.

Best sort of therapist in the world, if you ask me.


End file.
